Bring Your B-Game: Bujingai - The Forsaken City

Dannnn. License to Ill came out in '86. You can't complain about "the kids" and then say you don't understand the Beastie Boys album. You were like 4 when that album came out. That is not a thing "the kids" say.

Can anyone tell me why I saw "Bujingai - The Forsaken City" and thought "that scifi samurai game with Gackt in it" despite having never seen much of it besides a review or two when it came out yet I can't remember close relations' birthdays or even people's names I've met on multiple occasions?

geico

Rigor, Mortise, and Tenon. Would have been a good team name. Oh well.

Is Singularity for the PS3/360 a B game?

I remember this FPS game being the entirety of the time shifting level from Titanfall 2.

visual as fuuuuuck

Marlow Briggs, apex B-game.

THIS person is 100% right.

I still remember this game from tgs coverage from back in the day haha, I remember a lot of flying around while fighting though.

Cool to now finally actually see how this game turned out more than 10 years later.

I am amazed I didn't hear about this game, this looks like the kind of game 12 year old me would have loved, hell 25 year old me thinks it looks alright.

Always liked this game

The game might be a B, but that framerate is A+

That is an extremely generous combo multiplier

@emjaylawthertin: Space Marine is 100% a B game and 100% UNBELIEVABLY FUCKING AWESOME

ahhh gamespot seems to have turned off the upvotes on the review of this game...ah..... Heh. Likely a smart thing for them to do though.

I like this idea of not revealing what the B game is until they play it live. I hope they keep doing that.

@beforet: sure why not? ^_^

Shadow of Rome would be a B-game I'd love to see the guys finish. I've been meaning to beat it myself recently; I've heard it's a bit of a hidden gem.

All this Gackt Talk and no one told Dan about him being in MGS2 during the Tanker chapter?

Also Dan seems never to be able to grasp what a B-Game is, despite constantly listing out of the attributes of a B-Game . . .

Gackt is a pretty cool guy. He also genuinely likes playing video games.

Yes, this is a B-game. The fact that so few people even knew about this is what makes it a B-game. Generally if a game is very well known then it means it had a big marketing budget, which means it's probably A (or AA or AAA) caliber.

@alex I'm proud to announce that I was the 420th upvote for your review.

Bujingai was a great pull for this series, kudos to Alex.

Sure's a b-game. Sadly one that kinda made me just listen to this on the background and rather focus on their discussions.

This is quite a bit worse than what I would consider a B game. This is pretty poor, even for its time. PS2 was at the same time as Metroid Prime and RE4, we knew what decent games looked like then.

Anyway, I'll throw a suggestion into the ring. Baten Kaitos or, better yet, Baten Kaitos: Origins.

Chaos Legion is definitely a B-game, but one that I absolutely love. The thing that I remember most about it is how terrible/boring it is in the beginning. I bought it brand new when it came out and was ready to return it within the first hour, but I decided to stick with it instead and it wound up becoming one of my favorite PS2 games. So, yeah, it won't show very well on this particular feature, which is a shame.

I own Bujingai, for some reason. As others have said, it's actually a pretty cool game with some pretty cool mechanics that Alex never engaged with.

PS2 Shinobi was mentioned on the site in some capacity recently. That's a fucking B-game that would be worth showing off. It's alright.

So "B" game isn't to do with budget, quality, marketing, or anything tangible or definable. Dan's only definition are games he doesn't think are 'important'.

Also these games aren't really very entertaining to watch, I still enjoy the guys talking so for the most part this is decent content, but compared to what they could be doing (FMVinny, Random PC Game, maybe an east coast equivalent of Game Tapes where they watch old game commercials, 'The Making of XYZ Game' or TV spots) this just feels so mediocre.

Ironically this series is definitely B grade Giantbomb content.

Man this might be a C game.

@emjaylawthertin: Oh man that game was dope! I wish it had more to it but I loved what I played.

Dan confirmed to be a narc.

Don't get my hopes up. Seeing adult Thanatos might make me shed a tear. Besides what would come next, The Unholy War?! Ah man if only.

I for one knew of Bujingai and thought it was really cool. One of my best bargain bin purchases in the PS2 era. It's really short overall but stylish and if you get into the mechanics they aren't half bad even if they aren't that deep. From what I remember the bamboo forest is easily the absolute worst part of the game; boring, too long and a bit annoying to navigate. After that it gets more straightforward and the further you get the more you fight enemies that are actually fun and not just fodder.

Ooh this was a really neat game but I remember it taking me a lot of time to wrap my head around how to play it well, I read some guides online for it and liked it a lot afterwards. A hack and slash game with the ability to snap your fingers and summon a bunch of demons to hack your enemies to pieces is definitely up there in terms of cool.

They talk a lot of smack about the Vita, but there are new Vita games coming out every week. There have actually been way more Vita games released in the last 6 months than there have for all of Nintendo platforms combined.

Of course most of them are all JRPG and other games I have zero interest in, but they are there.

All I remember about this game is being excited for it for some reason and never actually playing it once it came out.

@lavenderhaze: Great first post!

@alex Your Bujingai review has 499 upvotes on GameSpot. As random points of comparison, MGSV review has 712, BotW has 504. Bujingai being one of GameSpot's most upvoted reviews is wonderfully dumb.

According to Wikipedia, Vita has 1416 games, and as you say they are still coming. A large proportion of those are one of Japan-only/visual novel/JRPG, but for the right audience it has a health library.

@christmasunicorn: @tjhall42: @emjaylawthertin: Warhammer 40K Space Marine is awesome and a perfect fit for this feature.

Also...

@danryckert For your reference

Wait, Dan is Rigour? This makes so much sense now.

"We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like Dan"

I guess this is a B game but it certainly feels rather C tier. Still I guess standards for B games do change with time.

@danryckert You guys should play Nano breaker or Trapt on the next BYBG.

Dan mentioned the Deception series (which Trapt is a part of) in this and previous videos. For all we know it's already on his "Bring Your B-Game" list.

Yes, Gackt is a pop artist, but that might not give you a good idea of who Gackt is. His fairly recent concerts with the Tokyo Philharmonic were pretty good (and one is on spotify), but I'm a sucker for that stuff (Metallica S&M was great).

@sluggdiddy: I'd endorse this as a pretty solid description. Best I've seen so far at least.

A game that overcomes it's flaws, doesn't have the marketing, budget or mindshare to be a AAA blockbuster, yet is also, and I think this is an important distinction, isn't outright bad.

B-movies can be terrible. A B-game is different. If it's just bad entirely it's not a B-game, it needs to be worth playing for some reason. Any reason. They're just not as disposable as a B-movie, probably thanks to the time investment.

A B is still a maybe, a "You might dig it if..." Below a certain threshold however just exists failures. I don't think a B-game can also be an abject failure.

@psylah: Oh shit man, I haven't heard that name in forever. Malice Mizer. Wow. Good pull.

@alex what ever happened to that proposed series of you playing offensively bad games that you introduced during the last big live live show a few years back? I'd still watch that if it were to ever happen.

I hope future episodes feature better games (space marine or singularity are both GREAT pulls, and also pretty damn good games), and also way less discussion of what a B-game is. it's an opinion, and opinions are not facts. just reasserting "this is a b-game" "this is not a b-game" felt pretty tiresome to me by the end of this episode, and i feel that part of the gag has worn out its welcome 3 episodes in. The idea of playing sub-AAA games is a good one, the navel gazing less so.

B Games: Ninja Blade, Singulartity, Enslaved, Conan and so forth...

"Ill, in the parlance of the kids, like the Beastie Boys..."

Dan, the Beastie Boys are in their 50s. They've been saying "ill" since before you were born.